CAREER: Application-Agnostic, Distributed-Aware Cloud Platforms

云计算已经从根本上改变了企业运行其应用程序的方式，允许许多不同的用户经济地共享大量的计算机。在这些云数据中心内运行的应用程序在规模和复杂性上都在不断增长。即使是相对简单的Web应用程序也可能由多个交互服务组件组成，例如Web服务器、数据库和数据缓存。结果是一个复杂的分布式应用程序，可能会出现性能瓶颈或组件之间的一致性要求。遗憾的是，现有的资源管理和可靠性工具单独考虑这些组件，并且往往没有意识到它们之间的重要关系。这项工作的基础是这样一个信念，即未来的数据中心必须是应用程序不可知的，但又是分布式计算感知的。该研究项目的目标是使云平台能够平衡这种权衡，从而提高性能、可靠性和效率。它的贡献将是双重的：1)为云提供商提供工具，以更好地了解其基础设施上运行的应用程序；2)新的资源管理和可靠性算法，为客户提供更强有力的保证。这些将通过内置于虚拟化层的独立于应用程序的解决方案来实现，这些解决方案仍然能够理解分布式应用程序的结构和依赖关系。更广泛的影响：这项工作将提高数据中心运行数百万人每天使用的Web应用程序的效率和可靠性。通过在虚拟化层应对这些挑战，我们将提供适合各种环境的灵活解决方案。该项目还包含一个重要的教育组成部分，以加强对从高中到研究生阶段的学生对云计算挑战的理解。

Cloud Computing has radically changed how businesses run their applications by allowing a huge number of computers to be economically shared by many different users. The applications running inside these cloud data centers are growing in size and complexity. Even a relatively straightforward web application is likely to be composed of multiple interacting service components such as a web server, a database, and a data cache. The result is a complicated distributed application that may exhibit performance bottlenecks or consistency requirements between components. Unfortunately, existing resource management and reliability tools consider these components individually, and are often unaware of the important relations between them. This work is predicated on the belief that future data centers must be application-agnostic, yet distributed-computing-aware. The goal of this research project is to enable cloud platforms to balance this trade-off, improving performance, reliability, and efficiency. Its contributions will be twofold: 1) tools for cloud providers to better understand the applications running on their infrastructure, and 2) new resource management and reliability algorithms that offer customers stronger guarantees. These will be achieved with application-agnostic solutions built into the virtualization layer, that are still capable of understanding the structure and dependencies of distributed applications. Broader Impact: This work will improve the efficiency and reliability of data centers running web applications used by millions of people daily. By attacking these challenges at the virtualization layer, we will provide flexible solutions fit for a wide variety of environments. The project also contains a significant educational component to enhance the understanding of cloud computing challenges for students at the high school through graduate levels.